'LUCKY SUPER' and MATT DILLON'S CAMBODIA

If you live in Phnom Penh, you've been to 'Lucky'.
Everything here is 'lucky'. There are 'lucky' supermarkets, hairstylists, motoshops, restaurants. The second most popular name, next to 'lucky', is 'lucky-lucky'.
Outside of 'Lucy Supermarket' (which is right next door to 'Lucky Burger'), there are always two or three girls (and sometimes boys) waiting to sell you the latest edition of THE PHNOM PENH POST (which is weekly) or THE CAMBODIA DAILY (which is, um, daily). You hop off the moto and head towards the entrance and are bombarded by the sound of: 'Suh! 'Suh! DAILY? PHNOM PENH POST?' DAILY? Suh!' They are always dressed in drab, semi-dirty clothes, and they are persistent without being pushy.
After awhile (in my case, sixteen months), you get to know them by face, and they know you by face, which means, after saying that you don't want a paper, they will smile shyly and say: 'Ice cream, suh? Coca?' (Meaning, if you can't buy me a paper, the least you can do is get me a lousy chocolate cone or a can of Coke.)
Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don't. You feel guilty if you don't, because it means you're a cheap son of a gun, and you feel guilty if you do, because it means you're a liberal do-gooder condescending to provide a bit of momentary relief for helpless kids.
Living here gives you a weird kind of power. Meaning, even if you don't have much money, you sure as hell have more money than these people do. You know it. They know it. You feel it every day, and simply by shopping, you feel like you're flaunting it, too. But what can you do? You live your life and they live their lives.
I go home at night. I'm not sure where the kids outside 'Lucky' go, nor their begging mothers that drift around the entrance, babies wrapped around their necks like shawls. But they're back, almost every day, almost all of them, the regulars, trying to sell, trying to beg, and I don't if that's a little bit sad or a little bit hopeful.

Matt Dillon always looks like he just got out of bed. Or, you know when you see your friend on the street, and you sneak up behind him, and you whack him on the back of the neck, and he turns around and gives you a look that says: "Who the @#!?" (Doesn't anybody else do that? No? Oh...)
Well, that's what Matt Dillon looks like. All the time. In every scene of every movie he's ever been in.
But it works for CITY OF GHOSTS, which he co-wrote and directed, and which is about Phnom Penh and all the seedy lowlifes that inhabit its environs. (Present company absolutely included.)
Actually, it's not really ABOUT Phnom Penh, or Cambodia; it's a crime thriller that could have been set in any Southeast Asian country, I think, but Dillon nails the feel of the city and the country pretty well, I think. Maybe he overdramatizes the seedy part. (Then again, maybe not.) In any event, it's atmospheric and moody and the cinematic equivalent of Matt Dillon's face. And there's lots of little in-jokes for people who know Cambodia.
And over the end credits plays what is, probably, the only Khmer language version of that Joni Mitchell song titled, I think, 'Both sides now'. (You know, the one that has the line "I don't know love at all...") And it's performed by a band called DENGUE FEVER, which is an illness that I got last year in Phnom Penh, and it's really, really terrible, and it did not make me feel like singing Joni Mitchell songs at ALL, especially not in Cambodian, but hey. Different strokes, and all that...